THE WORK AND IDEAS PRESENTED BY JADE MONTSERRAT AND PIPPILOTTI RIST ARTS

‘PERFORMITY’ AND THE POLITICS OF HUMAN BODY

Introduction

Jade Montserrat, an activist whose artwork is based on the relationship between art and activism, expresses his thoughts through drawing, designing sculptures, filming, live performance, and video installations. Currently, the artist has made a huge transformation on the gallery walls with his charcoal drawn artworks and his designed structures that carry several events that are related to his ideas regarding body care and education. Montserrat started this project in 2018 when he was working in Bluecoat Liverpool Centre for Contemporary Arts residence. During this time, the artist was able to meet various local artists, educators as well as activists. This is where he got to perfectly sharpened his skills in artwork and activism.

On the other hand, Pippilotti Rist is known to create very playful video arts. In her artworks, Pippilotti subverted ordinary ideas on how to make use of the screens in the 1980s at a time before carrying small screens in the pocket was not yet seen as a norm. She nicknamed herself Pippilotti while in Vienna attending art school. Pippilotti who is a Swiss artist talks about her exquisite and surreal artwork that focuses more on the human body. The artist’s work is underpinned in the preoccupation of the female body in which she includes video installations, sculpture drawings as well as audio.

During one of her performances, in her work ‘I am Not the Girl who misses much’, Rist dances freely for the camera with her breasts bare, this is one of her works where she earned her reputation a female body positive and activist. In another of her Video installation in 1997, an art titled ‘Ever is Over All’, Rist portrays that ‘politically’ she is a feminist but in person, she is not a feminist. According to Pippilotti, the image of a woman in her art does not only stand for just an ordinary woman but it stands out for everybody. Pippilotti hopes that even a young man would be able to recognize her art as much as women would.

Contemporary Art Performativity and the Politics of the Female Body

The Work and Ideas of Jade Montserrat

During her performance of her art piece in 2016, Jade Montserrat enacts a famous dance routine and in doing so, Montserrat the majorly research-guided visual artist delves into chauvinistic stereotypes[1]. Additionally, she explores the status of the black body and how Baker, whose dance routine she had copied was able to bring all these elements together making her become the most known Black entertainer during her time. While performing Bakers’ dance routine, Montserrat’s enthusiasm seems to reduce and her movements looking passive that could make one wonder if she was a willing participant. However, she does this because she could feel all the racial issues and the gender dynamics that came along during the performance. Jade’s performances were majorly considered subjects of diaspora culture and her performances were sometimes problematically controlled. Critics termed her art performances as modern aesthetics which was regarded as a response to liberation and industrialization processes[2].

In 2018, Montserrat got an appointment by the Art on the Underground to make designs and new covers and several posters[3]. Jade’s art is majorly done in pencils and watercolor pieces. The designs have short writings in which short statements are made to explain some of the elements of political propaganda which are put in social media. She addresses social injustices using a poetic and urgency approach and her public nature helps her inconveniently conveying the message.

In a poster, she designed titled My Anger my Motivation, which quotes Baroness Grenfell Tower, and another on which she titled Memories of Sarah Reed[4]. In this work, she highlights how Reed had an encounter of police brutality in 2016 and ended up committing suicide while serving in prison. Being a victim of a high profile case, despite the prison staff being well aware of that and her mental instability status they still convicted her to serve her sentence. Jade used this series to bring out a picture of structural racism as well as a failure from the prison institution[5]. Jade nicely presents these ideologies through poetry statements that indicate what women go through in their daily life encounters.

Jade approaches her artwork from the aspect of societal heritage and cultural practices. She is also concerned about self-knowledge issues from the society[6]. As an artist, Jade tries to dig dip in her culture to find out what it is all about. She engages herself to learn her true identity since she is a black girl who is adopted to a white family staying in the Northern part of the United Kingdom. She grows from a child who is an introvert to being to a charming iconic lady.  Montserrat works towards putting her artwork together through her live performances, producing films, video installations as well as using sculpture[7]. The young artist explores these media intending to expose the differences between visual and linguistic characteristics.

Montserrat derives her inspiration from the bibliography of various writers including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bell hooks among several other writers. In her work The Rainbow Tribe, Jade adopts the title of her work from Josephine Bakers’ twentieth-century work.  In this work, children from twelve different ethnic groups are adopted by Baker. Jade analyzes Baker’s tales and her ideas towards a mixed-race family in the modern world surrounded by cultural diversity. Montserrat in her work ‘Rainbow tribe’ defines the artwork as a cultural blend of people from different cultural backgrounds.

Several other artworks and performances draw Montserrat’s attention to the origin of slavery, the ideas of migration and how all these impacted the culture of the Black Atlantic people. Jade uses watercolors which addressers her audience directly with random texts which are strategically placed with close-up images of the human body. There are haunting lips and eyes which reflect the selfie generation where everyone has the potential to become a celebrity. In these pieces of artwork, Montserrat gets to appoint of questioning the collective responsibility as worldwide participants in a stage that is attended globally.

In her three stories in her work Art on the Underground, Jade seeks to find out the truths and the eyes of the general public about the invisible citizens. In her other works, she expresses her thoughts about freedom. Through art piece In Memory of Sarah, Reed Montserrat tries to get to people’s attention that she was disappointed by the legal authority officials just like Grenfell. This is because Sarah Reed was struggling to access medication while in jail and ended up dying because the prison staff did not understand her mental state[8]. Jade’s attention is drawn to Sarah by a childhood photograph of Sarah and she notices a strutting resemblance. This makes her explain that anyone could find themselves in a place where no one is ready to understand their situations.

In her other works, Montserrat hopes that her contribution through arts in these cultural aspects would be able to bring sanity to the cultural practices and deliberate those whose freedoms have been taken by the powers as well as those serving as slaves. She wonders how society can come together amidst the various injustices in their midst[9]. Under her pencil artworks, there are rainbow colors which she uses to hint her hope for a complete cultural renewal and optimism. To Jade, the rainbow colors signify the peace that should prevail in the society. She believes that every member of society has a responsibility towards ensuring peace and equality despite being from a different race or ethnicity. Montserrat admits that’s she enjoys playing on words between peace and the materiality of a piece of paper.

The Works and Ideas of Pippilotti Rist

Pippilotti Rist in her works of over forty years, often speaks about how the rise of conceptualism and how the gap between contemporary art and the general world has continued to widen[10]. In her opinion, Rist thinks that some people view art as some type of parochial play among artists. She feels art was less appreciated as much as she values artwork. Rist’s whole life is almost coincident with her video art. Unlike many of her contemporary artists, Rist does not engage in artworks like drawings or paintings. She purely creates video art and sculptures. Rist treats artwork as a service and herself as a worker and that’s what makes her more interested in artwork.

During her career days, Rist has learned and reinvented various ways through which she can represent bodies through technological media especially the female body. Rist has mastered the immersive challenges that come with videos and these challenges the position of the passive audience. In her art, Rist has a method of disrupting the condition of a frame and then creating an instance of a force that attracts the viewer to the inside content of the work[11]. In her power, the artist attempts to subvert the way the society looks at women and what all the expectations that society has embedded in the women.

According to President Donald Trump commentary of Rist’s work, there is no other artist who uses their work to satirize the society as Rist does. Rist Satirizes the American male-dominated society and the political standards and patterns using her work. In one of her video artworks titled Open my Glade, Rist says that human beings always desire to violate any screens and jump out to the square⁹. Although Rist is primarily known as a video artist, in recent decades, she has constantly done outstanding art pieces that have seen her in a position where she can be regarded as a pioneer in the upcoming technological media.

The Rist’s artworks are on display at the New Museum. For instance, her work titled Pixel Forest shows a combination of a video, a smartphone and several other great works that display the uniqueness of the female body[12]. Through her visual works, she also brings to attention the notion of gender and sexuality. She somehow hints at the idea of taking a selfie with a smartphone that comes into existence barely a decade later in her work titled Open My Glade[13]. Pippilotti further affirms that women tend to use methods that go against their nature when they want to get a project done and that most women never admit the fact that they are taking advantage by men’s strategies since they think that by doing this they would become sexually unattractive and so women are forced to suppress what they feel.

When creating her video Ever is All Over, Pippilotti features a bouquet in one of the videos. The flowers are portrayed swaying in a pastoral land. In the other video, Rist is shown walking in a slow-motion happily swinging a flower which is having a long stem. In the background, Rist stops swinging the flower and shatters windows of cars parked in a nearby city street violently[14]. This video won Rist two awards, a Premio 200 award as well as Venice Biennale in the 1997[15]. Beyoncé in her video of Hold Up embedded Rist’s work on her piece and the blende video brought out very powerful if not an evocative artwork[16]. Both of the artists focused on bringing out the aspect of empowering women, showing the strength as well as creativity among the female artists. This empowerment particularly focused on black women in the United States.

Rist focuses on fully being in charge of her artwork, her body and how she represents herself through her work to contemporary society. She fiercely displays herself as a feminist even when on stage during her live performance in the 2014VMA[17]. Pippilotti is more open for contemporary feminism as well as the urge to give attention to the cultural needs of the Black people and their social needs. She insists through her art that is worthy of feminism to be acknowledged as an attempt to put the society in order either socially or culturally. She noted that feminism has never been acknowledged in history even though feminists put in the effort to prevent society from falling apart[18].

Rist artistic videos bring out the illusions of a woman world which is soft although blatantly employing violence. It is not only that the stem of the flower is long and erect but also that the flower in itself is quite specific. The flower is Red-hot poker that has a very close resemblance with a human erect penis. During the last few minutes of the video, the artist shows image of a garden full of the Red-hot flower. At first, the flowers seem to look upright than when the cameras turn they suddenly look upside-down. To Rist, the Choice of cars is very relevant and, in her context, flowers are used to represent feminism and cars are used to represent masculinity, hard and technology. Flowers are also used in the video to reflect the soft nature of the feminine beings[19].

Referring to his art to cars, Graham Coulter- Smith also explained that cars are machines in nature and so unlike the flowers in the garden which just portray nature, this, however, provides a stereotypical aspect of view, putting women with nature, the flowers and grouping men with cars. This can be related to the concept in which Rist use technology an installation artwork[20]. Rist also talks directly about the video being a medium and an art that needs to be measured. According to Rist, the simplified and precise band should be an appropriate way of showing what looks like varied forms of blended ideas.

The earlier scenes in the same video show a policewoman walking slowly past Rist, the lady is smiling and nodding in approval. Rist looks at the officer and goes ahead to break another car window[21]. The soundtrack which accompanies this scene is soft but it is however interrupted by the sound of the Shattering car glass windows occasionally. The scene brings a mixture of a lot of things and the ideas portrayed is that of urban fantasy romance some disruption noise of the ongoing destruction. Some elements of psychological imaginations are also brought to the picture. This is how Pipillotti uses her artistic medium to express the exploding new medium at that particular time[22]

The playfulness portrayed in the video together with Rist’s blatant character creates a mesmerizing scene. Rist in her art videos uses the element of powerful feminine women to casually destroy the beliefs of men being mysteriously powerful over nature. The police officer being notably a woman witnesses her shattering the car windows and only managing to node and smile past her without intervening indicates the flirtatious criticism on gender[23]. This art also portrays the section of the socially accepted violence. The police officer who is notably a woman not only allows her to continue with the violence but also gladly salutes her brutality and violence in an environment that should be protected. Rist employs this artistic as well as a feminist scene to show how the masculine institutional power was bestowed upon men.

In her art, Rist doesn’t leave any details untouched, in all her art videos, she dresses her feminism accordingly putting all the feminine details attached to her dress-code accordingly. In most of her pieces of art Rist brings out aspects of women who are trying to get themselves outside the confines of the roles that have been prescribed for them. Throughout the decades of performance, Rist’s artwork has continued to pursue audiences to start considering protecting the nature that she talks about in most of her arts. She enforces this by using very seductive pictures and enticing images of the ‘nature’ that she is making references towards. She tries to expound on violence against nature, feminism, masculinity and some sorts of beauty in her work[24]. Rist’s pieces of work are all covered up in flowers, sorts of trees and some grass. She employs organic forms that she uses to represents the difference between oneself and the other person whether they are organic or manmade. She refers to panties as ‘temples to the abdomen’. She then turned these panties into chandeliers and made people look at their insides[25].

During one of her live performances, Rist did a Minnie-Mouse dance as she sang repeatedly sang faster a line from Beatles ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ that says ‘I am not a girl who misses much’. She goes ahead to confess that one of her greatest battles it to reconcile her body and her thoughts. she sees this as one of the problems that women who focus much on feminism face[26]. Rist’s artwork is largely celebrated because her feminism doe not only focus on women.  She insists that her feminism stands for all humans and that she is not a political feminism[27].  Rist is an artist whose work has been celebrated and appreciated throughout ages. Various feminists have been able to borrow from her especially on matters of public confrontations.

As many people think towards the move to make normal a woman’s monthly period and finish the stigma towards women’s strangely functioning bodies, it is seen as a completely political feminism move. However, this is a move in which women are seeking to widely understand the man’s body to achieve a mutual understanding of what it means to be human by understanding the entirety of the human body. The whole human body revolves around a lot of societal implications and is also considered as a political act. In her work Pour Your Body out in 2009, Rist climbs out a pool of water putting on a white pantie in which there is some blood drips that were quite disgusting[28]. The New York commented on this saying that one doesn’t need to be a feminist or a critique to understand the meaning of a female artist showing drips of blood on her panties.

For several decades, Rist has continued to define video art and how the technology is used in video installation through her works. She has popularly associated her work with pop culture and has always talked about her work as solely devoted to achieving social change.  The use of sensual and explicit colors in her video art has always inspired all her viewers. To her, the way she incorporates the sounds and visions to bring out nature goes far beyond just sexual suggestiveness.  Her art touches the use of advanced technology, gender and its limitations, institutionalization as well as the aspect of mechanization[29]. Being such a big fan of Beyoncé through her outspoken statements on feminism, she feels that it is frustrating to lose the opportunity to address the issues of feminism at the societal level through her artwork[30]. Since Rist got over acknowledged, her influence could have probably been understood as any other women’s work which happens daily in the media.

In summary, it is worth noting that both Rist and Jade artworks showcase women who are so multitalented and quite endowed with illusions and new discoveries every day.  These artist artworks are intoxicatingly blissful but tries to bring out inspiration and a feeling of pensive sadness.  The artists create a celebration in artwork in a way to make the chaos persist.  This can be evidence from   their pieces of art such as Open My Glade by Rist which is an art video that mesmerizes and creates an atmosphere of celebration and extraordinary fun[31]. Their artworks show how supernatural it is to be alive. These women surpass cultural stigma and utilize artwork to boldly demonstrate the themes of performatitviy and the politics of the female body in the contemporary art. The artists show how women are unrecognized and how cultural perceptions influences women artists to a great extent.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. “Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory.” In The RoutledgeFalmer reader in gender & education, pp. 73-83. Routledge, 2006

Davis, Heather, and Etienne Turpin. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies. Open Humanities Press, 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdLuwX2uRTM.

Kane, Carolyn L. “The synthetic color sense of Pipilotti Rist, or, Deleuzian color theory for electronic media art.” Visual Communication 10, no. 4 (2011): 475-497.

“Moma | The Body In Art”. 2020. Moma.Org. https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/investigating-identity/the-body-in-art/.

Montserrat, Jade. “Book review: Renegotiating the body: feminist art in 1970sLondon.” LSE Review of Books (2013).

Stern, Mark. 2020. “Is Beyoncé’S Windshield-Destroying Stroll In Lemonade Based On This ’90S Art Film?”. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/culture/2016/04/is-beyonces-car-destroying-stroll-in-lemonade-based-on-this-pipilotti-rist-art-film.html.

“Pipilotti Rist Interview: Freeing The Wonderlight”. 2020. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjmmAzS63H8.

“(Some Possibilities Of) Rural Belongings | Jade Montserrat And Daniella Rose King — Women & Performance”. 2020. Women & Performance. https://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/28-3-rose-king-montserrat.

“Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest. Solo Exhibition At New Museum, New York City”. 2020. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRnDHu0Fmtk.

[1] “Moma | The Body In Art”. 2020. Moma.Org. https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/investigating-identity/the-body-in-art/.

[2] Davis, Heather, and Etienne Turpin. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies. Open Humanities Press, 2015.

[3] Butler, Judith. “Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory.” In The RoutledgeFalmer reader in gender & education, pp. 73-83. Routledge, 2006

[4] “(Some Possibilities Of) Rural Belongings | Jade Montserrat And Daniella Rose King — Women & Performance”. 2020. Women & Performance. https://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/28-3-rose-king-montserrat.

[5]  Ibid.,4

[6]  Ibid.,4

[7]  Ibid.,5

[8] Ibid., 5

[9] Montserrat, Jade. “Book review: Renegotiating the body: feminist art in 1970sLondon.” LSE Review of Books (2013).

[10] Ibid., 5

[11]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdLuwX2uRTM.

[12] “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest. Solo Exhibition At New Museum, New York City”. 2020. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRnDHu0Fmtk.

[13] Kane, Carolyn L. “The synthetic color sense of Pipilotti Rist, or, Deleuzian color theory for electronic media art.” Visual Communication 10, no. 4 (2011): 475-497.

[14] Stern, Mark. 2020. “Is Beyoncé’S Windshield-Destroying Stroll In Lemonade Based On This ’90S Art Film?”. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/culture/2016/04/is-beyonces-car-destroying-stroll-in-lemonade-based-on-this-pipilotti-rist-art-film.html.

[15] Ibid.,8

[16] Ibid.,8

[17] Ibid.,8

[18] Ibid.,9

[19] Ibid.,9

[20] Ibid.,9

[21] Ibid.,9

[22] Ibid.,10

[23] Ibid., 10

[24] Ibid.,11

[25] Ibid., 11

[26] “Pipilotti Rist Interview: Freeing The Wonderlight”. 2020. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjmmAzS63H8

[27] Ibid., 11

[28] Ibid.,11

[29] Ibid., 12

[30] Ibid.,12

[31] Ibid.12